The present invention relates to knitting needles for a raceway circular knitting machine, an eight-lock circular knitting machine and an interlock circular knitting machine and their use.
Knitting needles are placed with their backs contacting the needle beds of the needle grooves in a cylinder of a circular knitting machine. They are often used in a combination of several kinds of needles with different butt positions within the same knitting machine. The knitting needles rotate at a high speed as the cylinder rotates, and, at the same time, the needle butts perform high-speed reciprocating movement as they are activated by cams in fixed cam holders that are so arranged to face the needle butts.
Various types of knitting needles that withstand high-speed knitting have so far been invented. For example, it is known to be effective to provide cutouts on the needle body that is between the butt and the needle head alternately from the upper side and the lower side, which gives the entire needle a meanderform by forming bridges therein.
The needles having bridges are more effective compared with the needles in the past. However, a problem have arisen when the knitting speed becomes faster and the force applied by the cam to the butt becomes large enough to force the butt to incline in the opposite direction to the rotary movement of the cylinder. When two needles with different butt positions are placed adjacent to each other in which the butt of a given needle is not adjoined by a bridge of the adjacent needle, as is the case in prior art techniques, a gap is made between the insert wall or insert piece of the cylinder toward which the butt inclines and the next insert wall of the cylinder. As a result, the butt is likely to get damaged, and the damage of the butt could cause damages to the insert wall and the cylinder. The damage to the butt of a needle could also trigger damage to butts of several needles in a chain reaction. Should this happen, damage to the cylinder will be too serious for repair, and replacement will be inevitable. The object of the present invention is to solve this problem.